Video: What Dota 2’s VR Spectator Mode Looks Like!

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Fancy a peek at a video and some screenshots and gifs from Dota 2‘s [official site] newly arrived VR spectator mode? The video has snippets of what you can expect if you boot up VR Spectator Mode at the moment and you’ll find that just after the jump!

For the screenshots use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard or the arrows above (and then below because our gallery likes to be contrary) the image*.

It starts off boring because I think the Dota 2 servers are having issues today so me clicking to join the lobby was just not registering for ages and then I got a replay error. I’m leaving it in because I wanted to show you what the experience I had was actually like and it wasn’t all positive.

BUT! Despite some of the clunkiness it is also spectacular to see and there is also weird awkward controller dancing, a close-up of Roshan’s undercarriage and a peek at the ace player champion representations:

There’s also a hero showcase mode where you can take a look at your heroes and their respective loadouts up close:

I’m not sure how much I’ll be using the mode to spectate actual matches – I still find my eyes feeling really strained after a while in VR so a long match might necessitate a lie down and an ice pack. Plus there’s also the issue that sometimes the work Vive’s wonky base station will suddenly tip the whole virtual room 90 degrees. But as a showcase of what’s possible and how it might affect or augment esports viewing it’s pretty darn cool.

And now STILL IMAGES! As I say, use the arrows on the page or your left and right arrow keys…

*Seriously, take my advice and use the arrow keys. They don’t jump around.

Ah another VR video, another round of viewpoint-grenade-lobbing. Whilst I get it being something of a necessary evil in games that are built around the controllers there’s then the times like this when surely implementing something revolutionary like kb support seems glaringly obvious for what is an at-seat experience that gains nothing so far as I can tell from using the controllers.
Heck just give the controllers either an analog nubbin or dpad that can be used for movement, of course I’m sure some games would be unsuited for it, but having the option would be better than not at all surely, after all moving in one direction whilst looking around in others isn’t exactly an alien concept.

There’s a lot of qualifiers in here that make it sound like you haven’t tried VR at all. Keyboard controls don’t work well when you can’t see the keyboard, and movement with a joystick is okayish but tends to make people feel nauseous. There’s a reason so many games are gravitating towards the teleport thing. It’s not the nicest looking from the outside but it’s the one that honestly works best for a lot of people.

Moving in one direction while looking in another isn’t an alien concept, but doing so with no inertia or body feedback whatsoever is not something the inner ear appreciates.

Yeah… you have not tried a Vive, have you? A few Vive games have given you the ability move using the trackpad. It doesn’t work. You can do it, but you need a strong stomach, and you are still going to literally stumble when you first try it. The disconnect between your sense of balance and your eyes is crippling in how bad it is. You can move forward and backwards kind of sort without losing, but strafe or turn, and it will send even me to the ground. No, really, you just can’t control it that way without being pretty hardcore in terms of stomach and balance. Even for a hardcore guy like myself who can stomach it, it is just less effective than the old grenade lob.

There are other paradigms that work pretty decently. Jogging in place actually makes moving forward while standing work pretty well as it seems to confuse your inner ear just enough where your brain is like, “fuck, I’ll just believe what eyes or seeing, inner ear is obviously drunk”. Basically, humans are visual as fuck. We believe sight over all other senses, as you will find when your friends try and set your Vive controller down on a virtual desk. The one sense that the body seems to believe almost as much as your eyes is your inner ear. When the two senses conflict, things get confusing. The grenade lob movement and simply walking around fixes the disconnect.

Basically, you can teleport as fast as you want as far as you want, and your inner ear won’t complain at all. Move the screen forward or worse, turn or strafe, and your inner ear freaks the fuck out.